Today, the Commerce Department issued a notice in the Federal Register containing proposed regulations to establish an “Aluminum Import Monitoring and Analysis” (AIM) system. The Commerce Department’s fiscal year 2021 budget request included the creation of the monitoring system as a priority item. The Aluminum Association has prioritized the development of an import monitoring system in response to the troubling rise of imports for flat-rolled aluminum products. Last year, a bipartisan group of nearly 30 members of Congress sent a letter calling for its creation.

“This is an important step by the administration to fulfill its promise to establish an aluminum-specific import monitoring system. Aluminum monitoring will enable government officials and the industry to better identify trends in trade flows and address misclassification, transshipment and evasion of duties,” said Tom Dobbins, president & CEO of the Aluminum Association. “The Aluminum Association, which represents the entire industry value chain in the United States, is calling on Congress to ensure this program is fully funded in the coming fiscal year.”

While targeted trade enforcement activity, including successful antidumping and countervailing duty cases, have reduced imports of Chinese aluminum into the U.S. in recent years, China’s overcapacity continues to grow – and, unfortunately, to penetrate other foreign markets. Over the past five years, aluminum overcapacity in China has grown by 60 percent and increasingly that metal is being exported to third party countries, further distorting global markets. China exported more than 3.7 million tons of flat-rolled aluminum products to the rest of the world in 2019, an increase of nearly 68 percent in just five years. Increasingly, as Chinese exports displace domestic production in foreign markets, producers in those countries are exporting their own production to the United States.